10 Fantastic Ideas for Painting Activities with Kids

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Painting is always one of the favorite activities that Sam likes to do. A palette of color, a brush and some paper can keep her engaged for a long while. Her inner artist is really happy to mix the colors and paint abstract art (as I like to call it) for hours at end. But even then every once in a while she gets bored of simply painting with a brush and that is when it gets really interesting.

This summer vacation we have been experimenting with a lot of painting activities for kids and most of them needed no paint brush. It is very important and beneficial to explore various textures, mediums, ideas and techniques for painting ideas for kids or otherwise any play activity. The reason being that when you things differently you open their minds to infinite possibilities. You let them know that things don’t always have to be done in a certain way and that if you think out of the box your mind can come up with the most brilliant ideas.

From Straws, strings, bubble wrap to magnets take a look at the various ideas for painting activities for kids we used.

10 Fantastic Ideas for Painting Activities with Kids

Straw Painting

Straws are such a versatile play material for art and craft ideas. You can blow bubbles in the water, use them beads in a string necklace or even paint with them. When I told Sam that she was going to paint with a straw today she was well skeptical but then I showed her how it could be done and she was squealing in delight. We decided to make a flower garden and straw painting was used to make the stems.

I put some blobs of paint on the paper and showed her how blowing air through the straw would make the paint move and how my controlling the straw she could make the paint move the way she wanted to. Petite thing that she is it took her some time to blow through the straw enough to make the paint move but she learnt it pretty quick and look how pretty our stems turned out to be.

Bottle Stamping

Next we decided to make the flowers for our flower garden using a bottle. (A cold drink bottle is great for this!) Just dip the bottom of the bottle in some paint and stamp away to get beautiful flowers. Sam finished the flowers off with her thumb prints and our garden was complete. Painting with kids can be a breeze when you use techniques like bottle stamping.

String Painting

Ideally yarn would have been great for this but since we didn’t have it at hand we went with strings. It is so simple just dip various lengths of strings in different color paints and paint away. I didn’t tell Sam what to paint but let them just explore the idea by herself and I think she did a pretty good job of it. She painted on one half of the paper and then pressed the other half on to it to make an impression.

Spin Painting

For this painting you need to have paper plates or cds or basically anything round and flat. Put some paint on the bottom of the paper plate or CD and then put the colored part on the paper. Then ask your kid to spin the paper plate on the paper for a while. When the lift off the plate there will be a beautiful design waiting for them. The sparkle in my daughter’s eyes when she lifted off the plate and saw the design showed how the kids appreciate simple joys of life. She did this activity many times using various mediums and loved it every single time.

Hand print painting

This is not an uncommon technique and kids love to do it all the time. Seeing their little hand prints come alive in color is just magical for kids. We decided to give it a slight twist by turning Sam’s prints into a butterfly. The hand prints form the wings and the fingerprints can become the design.

Magnet Painting

This was the most favorite technique for Sam. Just put blobs of paints on a sheet of paper along with a metal paper clip. Hold the sheet horizontally and with the other hand get a magnet under the sheet and move it. When the magnet moves the paperclip it will create gorgeous designs. You also get to teach your child the science behind magnets attracting metals in a fun way. Isn’t that a great bonus?

Shaving Cream Art

We did this a while back and although we didn’t add any color to it you can do it for sure. Shaving cream’s texture is something kids love. It is the softest, gooey kind of feeling and kids like that. I poured the shaving foam in a tray and let Sam make designs, numbers, letters with it. When she had enough of that I gave her a few old cupcake moulds and she went to town making cupcakes with the foam. To add sprinkles we used pencil shavings. Admit it, it does look yum!

Bubble wrap painting

Other than making popping sounds you can also use bubble wrap to make beautiful prints. I taped the bubble wrap on the table and then asked Sam to paint on it as she liked and once she was done we took prints off the bubble wrap. These look so elegant and I am actually thinking of some more ideas to with this.

Fingerprint Art

Confession- I didn’t do this activity with Sam instead she did this in her school but I think it can be done at home and it is a great activity too. With thumb prints they made an adorable watermelon and got it laminated so each child had a place mat of their own. A simple painting technique and a wonderful art piece to keep.

Puffy Painting

We haven’t done this activity yet but we plan to do it very soon and that is why it is there in the list. I think this is an awesome activity which is not only exciting to do but once it dries off it looks really cool. Microwave puffy paint is definitely our next project.